GoAhead Software Goes Ahead with Open Source

GoAhead Software, best known for its 99.999% uptime HA middleware solutions, announced on March 19 that its main product, SAFfire, has converted its license from a closed source, proprietary model to open source under the LGPL. Simultaneously, they announced their acquisition of Avantellis from Emerson Network Power.

GoAhead’s current SAFfire customers enjoy the benefits of their open standards approach to HA middleware, easy integration into overall systems, no ‘lock-in’ and more. With over 60,000 software deployments in the telecommunications, aerospace, defense and media industries, GoAhead provides its customers with reduced developments costs and accelerated time to delivery. GoAhead also changed the SAFfire product’s name to OpenSAFfire to further accent its move to open source.

The move to open source might come as a surprise to some but is a natural evolution for GoAhead’s business model as a long-time supporter and creator of SA Forum specifications and its leadership and contributions to OpenSAF integration. Opening SAFfire’s source will likely accelerate Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) adoption by existing customers and engage others to look at this technology for their HA needs.

OpenSAFfire Features

Powerful HA Framework

Comprehensive System Management

Hot Standby Support

Logging, Tracing and Debugging

IP Failover Capabilities

High Performance Messaging and Load Sharing

Platform Integration and Tuning

As a long-time industry leader in HA middleware, their move to open source should benefit existing customers, as well as new ones, by further increasing the size and capacity of the community contributing to the core solution. With this licensing shift, all customers will receive the best of both worlds: the community “scale” benefits of open source and the deep expertise and experience of the combined GoAhead and Avantellis. Avantellis has extensive OpenSAF and HA experience.

The Avantellis acquisition will almost double GoAhead’s company size from a current 53 to a post-acquisition 97. Changing SAFfire to an open source product and acquiring Avantellis propel GoAhead into a ready position to open new markets and expand existing ones. GoAhead will continue to develop and support, SelfReliant, its proprietary high availability solution. Current contributors to OpenSAF (Ericsson, Emerson, HP, WindRiver and Huawei) will continue their support of the project.

In business for 14+ years, GoAhead Software has focused almost all of that time on the high availability software market. Early on, they focused on the telecommunications-especially wireless telecommunications-industry. Those customers have traditionally used GoAhead’s products to keep their networks up and running with 99.999%+ availability.

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